According to the polls not many people have changed their minds since the referendum, although there may be a few signs that this is beginning to change. Instead a shift to a Remain majority appears to be from the death of mainly older ‘Leave’ voters and entry to voting age of mainly ‘Remain’ young people.
It might be thought that the reactionary mess of Brexit would cause those supporting Lexit to reconsider but the obstacle to this is obviously the politics that got them to this position in the first place. I tried to get one supporter of Lexit to address this mess by asking him if he was happy with the way Brexit was going, but he refused to answer.
However, a sign that at least some are debating the question is shown in the latest issue of the International Socialism Journal (ISJ), which contains an article that calls for just such a reconsideration. In fact, it calls on the Socialist Workers Party to recognise that it made a mistake and to correct that mistake. It refers to the organisation’s earlier position on the European Economic Community as a way of helping it do so, and I have covered this history in a previous post.
The ISJ also contains an article continuing to defend Lexit from one of the leaders of the SWP, Alex Callinicos. A fair summary of this article would be ‘we were right, and anyway it doesn’t matter that much.’ In my experience this appears to be a common view among Lexit supporters and has the convenient effect of divorcing themselves from the real world consequences of Brexit and their support for it.
We can continue to refer to Brexit (and not Lexit) because this is what was on the ballot paper; this is what the campaigns to leave proposed in the referendum; this is what all the debate about implementation has been about since, and most obviously this is what SWP members voted for when they put their pencil on the ballot paper.
Any claims that they were actually voting for something other than what we are getting could only be true if the world were as SWP members wished it to be, and of course it isn’t. Examples of this denial of the world as it actually is is illustrated by Callinicos’ denial that the Brexit vote was racist while still having to admit that the result ‘partially’ encouraged racism.
Since racism is for him the over-riding issue this in itself should be enough to make him reconsider, but to actually do so would require acknowledgement that his reading of the result is nonsense. The article by Wayne Asher opposing Brexit in the same issue of the journal demonstrates this and contains enough material from the now widely publicised opinion poll commissioned by Lord Ashcroft to show that the Leave vote was thoroughly reactionary.
The core Brexit vote was nationalistic, xenophobic and racist, which is why it encouraged racism afterwards. It was centred on small capitalists, middle class reactionaries and demoralised workers, many of whom don’t normally vote or habitually vote Tory or UKIP. Whatever their disaffection with the status quo, their response to this status quo was to blame other victims and ally with those whose policy is to make things worse. Asher very effectively demolishes any argument that socialists should orient to these people, through what amounts to critical support for their reactionary project on spurious grounds that they are the basis of some anti-austerity protest.
The major argument of Callinicos however is that the issue of Brexit is not really that important – “which is the more important issue – the EU or racism?” Aside from artificially dividing them into wholly separate issues when even he admits Brexit has encouraged racism, both should be considered together, understanding that Brexit is the key assault on the working class at the moment and raises very important issues for workers and particularly socialists.
He acknowledges that the referendum result has been interpreted as a rejection of free movement for European citizens but draws no conclusions that maybe the result was therefore not for the best. If Brexit was something progressive why so many reactionary consequences?
To put a veil over all this we are told that despite “this deep political and constitutional crisis . . . the plight of British capitalism is unlikely fundamentally to change in or out of the EU.” He feigns agnosticism over whether the country will be worse off while acknowledging that supply chains will be disrupted, and states that Brexit has “simply highlighted the limits of the reconstruction of British capitalism under Thatcher.” A bit like cutting your right hand off to highlight the need to use your left just as well.
Callinicos refuses to acknowledge that the Brexit project will involve increased attacks on workers and that for the ultra-right this is one of its main objectives; he complacently claims that “the dynamics of global crisis will continue to work whatever happens on 29 March, and working people will still face attacks and need to fight back in or out of the EU.” If or when such attacks come will he be saying that these are simply run-of-the-mill attacks on workers’ living standards – nothing special? No particular cause?
By counterposing opposition to Brexit to opposition to racism he makes the claim that some Remainers are putting support for the EU ahead of fighting racism and fascism. Aside from his sleight of hand – that opposition to Brexit means support for the EU – it is he who has, to put it in his terms, put support for Brexit ahead of fighting racism and fascism.
He wishes to further divorce himself from responsibility for the project that he has supported by claiming that the rise of racism was happening anyway and that there is a tide of such reaction everywhere – so why blame Brexit? He ignores, or simply denies, that Brexit has made such racism worse and that Brexit is the project in Britain in which this reactionary movement involving Trump etc. has coalesced.
The idea that you can support Brexit while opposing racism and the racists is absurd – imagine a Lexit contingent on a Brexit demonstration consisting of the English Defence League, Football Lads Alliance and UKIP!
But ‘never mind’ seems to be the message – “where you stand on the EU is a secondary question”. “There is no reason why we can’t stand together against the main enemy – the bosses and the far right that the crisis of their system is strengthening.”
Yes, the millions of EU citizens working in Britain will see no issue with standing shoulder to shoulder with those who voted for Brexit and placed their right to live and work in Britain in danger. They shall ignore that it was not just some “crisis of the system” that has strengthened the far right but also Brexit.
In the real world, it is not for these millions of workers, or for the millions of working class Remain voters, to explain to the SWP why they will not join their anti-racist campaigns but for the SWP to explain how they could be their effective allies in fighting racism while still supporting Brexit.
Callinicos claims that in supporting it he is demonstrating that it is not impossible to campaign against the EU on a socialist basis, and that “the arguments for leaving the European Union were substantial and debate-worthy.”
However despite this, and his claim that Brexit was mainly motivated by progressive impulses, he nowhere presents the relevance of Brexit to any progressive struggle that is going on. Nor does not say how his and other left organisations supporting Brexit are helping to push it in a socialist direction. In fact he is not able to point to any initiative that is putting a left Brexit on the agenda. The only attempt at this is the ‘soft’ Brexit so far championed by Jeremy Corbyn, and this would still result in lower living standards and is in any case unworkable.
He admits that “the referendum wasn’t something that the left had campaigned for”, but given the argument that the EU is unreformable and is such an obstacle to progressive change you could be forgiven for seeking an explanation why not? The campaign however, and its result, has demonstrated that Lexit has been an irrelevance, if not those who consider it in relation to the integrity of socialism and Marxism.
Callinicos admits that the referendum result has threatened to “stoke populists anxieties with unpredictable consequences’ . . . “amid political and perhaps economic turmoil’ but again sees no reason to reconsider his support for what got us here.
Like the Tory Brexiteers who proclaimed the benefits of Brexit but buggered off when it came to implementing it, the supporters of Lexit have turned round to claim that their Platonic love child isn’t really that important.
The final act of abandonment is put forward in the final sentence of the article: “The radical and revolutionary left too should avoid getting trapped on one side or other of the debate within the ruling class and instead stand ready to promote and help shape “fundamental revolts”.
Having supported “one side”, as he puts it, by supporting Brexit, he now wants to claim that, actually, socialists should now not take sides. Of course if they followed his advice it would conveniently make implementation of Brexit that bit easier.
If only he and the other supporters of Lexit had decided to dump it earlier. It would have saved themselves, even if it would not have made much difference to the result.
Sráid Marx 
What you say is a good deconstruction of the SWP and also the Socialist Party for both organisations conjured up Lexit. However at least two other fringe ‘marxist’ organisations in Britain maintained that with respect to the EU referendum the authentic class position was to ask for a workers boycott. As the Brexit phenomenon was spun out of divisions within the Tory party that had been germinating for many years and came to a flowering with the defection of part of its membership to UKIP it was wrong to conclude British workers should side with one side of the Tory party or the other. As for the British Labour Party it has a history of refraining from taking the ‘great decisions of State’ leaving the really important decisions to the party of the ruling class and then filling in the details when in Government.
At the time of the EU vote I thought that a boycott for both Leave and Remain was the correct one using the standard class model of politics. However I offered my own proviso and I voted for Brexit. I thought a victory for Brexit could be beneficial for ‘us’ in the north Ireland. It would break the spell of the Good Friday Agreement over the minds of the people who thought the political struggle against the partition was no longer warranted. This idea was originated by John Hume who was the first to forcefully press the idea in numerous interviews and articles that partition was not relevant as both Great Britain and Ireland were equal partners operating within a political arrangement with a higher moral purpose, namely the EU . Hume’s big idea was taken up by the Irish business and political establishment, then taken up by the leadership of Sinn Fein, then the Major and Blair Governments and most reluctantly by Ulster Unionism. It was always a fabrication and a ruse, the Irish and British political establishments were certainly political partners but never the equal partners when it came to the north of Ireland, before the GFA could become law the British insisted the Irish Government removed articles two and three from its national Constitution.
We are now informed by all the quarrelling factions and personalities that the question of the so called Backstop concerning the Irish border is the main ground of difference between them. I have just finished viewing on youtube an interview with Irish Taoiseach Leo Varadka with a Euro news journalist at a place just right for the man, Davos.
Question : The Polish P.M. suggested the backstop could be limited to five years to save the withdrawal agreement with the British Government?
Answer : ‘The reason why we have peace in Ireland this twenty years is that the European Union swept away many of the differences between North and South and one of the of our big fears is that if Britain leaves and takes Northern Ireland with it these differences will return and will undermine the peace and a lot of what I do here in Davos and when I travel internationally is remind people of the higher stakes and the bigger picture that affects Ireland.’ When I here this I think of dear old John Hume without the ill fitting suit and uncombed hair.
I don’t believe that for one second that all of this political quarrelling over the status of the Irish border has anything to do with the economic well being of the border communities. The Taoiseach and Sinn Fein speak today as if the leaving of the the EU makes for a return to a Hard Border and even destroys the principle of the Good Friday agreement, the truth is it was the Good Friday that copper fastened the border and political partition.
All this Talk of Hard and Soft borders is just away of speaking about sovereign political issues in a disguised and misplaced economic language. Those voters in England who said they voted for Brexit over the political question of Political Sovereignty are also drowned out by all the talk about business, travel and culture. The fact is that the real British real with the EU is about the past, the present and the future of the British State. The British State is not a national state and this makes it different from many of the other EU States that are single nations States. The loss of sovereignty of the British State in its relation to the EU is more threatening to its past present and future than it is with many of the other smaller States.
In Continental Europe, during the second world war most of the small Political States were absolutely smashed, even the glorious French State was smashed, and after the war it was seriously doubted if the smashed States should be helped by the Allies back into existence. However the nations survived despite the smashed States, there was still a living French nation under Nazis occupation. The continental Europeans have therefore a different historical experience than the British. The Europeans find a driving political necessity in something like a European League of States, the British people have never experienced that political necessity, for the necessity came out of defeat in war, even today the Europeans confirm Alan Milward hypothesis that the European Idea rescued the nation State principle for an unlikely rebirth. The last chapter of his book deals with Britain and why it seemed to be different, the British people thought about the British State as something apart, it would never be smashed. The British people joined the EU for strictly economic and business reasons, there was no driving political necessity in it, however economic interests are forever changing and flexible, in contrast political concerns are near to being perennial.
I wonder if it is true to say that the Irish now too find a driving political necessity in the European Idea, it seems to me that they reasoned on the same flexible economic terms like the British. If the EU made proposed serious changes to their low tax on foreign companies policy would they be as loyal to the EU or become as disloyal as the British are. I wonder about it without firm conclusion.